Social outlook presented but are they really
I am really excited to talk to you. We are here at Harvard, which just
launched the Applied Social Media Lab, which is intended to study the
future of social media and its interaction with democracy. There’s a lot of
ideas to unpack there. Really quickly, tell us what the lab is meant to do
and your involvement in it.
There are a few things happening right now in that soup that are new,
one of which is AI, which I want to talk about. Another is two different
wars on two different fronts that are defined by mis- and disinformation at
scale. A third is what feels to me like a generational reset of how we
think about social media at large. We came through the Facebook era. We
went through what you might call the Twitter era. The Twitter era is
definitively over. It is now a different company with a different name, and
it feels like a younger generation is looking at social media differently.
They’ve been raised with different expectations. All of that feels like,
“Well, we’ve been at this for over a decade. Should we try something new,
or is something meaningful finally going to change?” Do you feel that as
well?
Absolutely. I think that the worst part of social media’s place in
society is people not understanding, in fact, what it is. People have a
naïve view: they open up their X feed or their Facebook feed, and [they
think] they’re just getting stuff that’s given to them in some kind of
neutral way, not recognizing that behind what’s given to them is the most
extraordinary intelligence that we have ever created in AI that is
extremely good at figuring out how to tweak the attitudes or emotions of
the people they’re engaging with to drive them down rabbit holes of
engagement. The only thing they care about is engagement.
The Facebook Files, which, two years ago, were released by Frances
Haugen —and you realize, “Wow, all of this is being fed to me for a reason,
and the reason really has nothing to do with making democracy work better
or helping me understand the world better — it’s all about using me for an
end that is not my own end.” The AIs that are doing it are the most
powerful intelligence that has ever tried to do this. It’s terrifying when
you realize it because [it’s] not clear what we do about it. There’s a lot
to unpack there. There’s the commercial incentives of the social media
platforms. There is the notion that we should regulate them in some way.
There’s the emergence of new technology, which might be hard to understand
for even the technologist, let alone the average person. Let’s start with
that middle bit: how we might regulate it. In countries around the world,
in Europe in particular and China, most particularly, the governments just
go ahead and regulate the social media networks. They do not have the
restrictions on speech regulations that we have in this country with the
First Amendment. We keep trying to get around it. There’s a number of ways
our government tries to get around it.
In China, which obviously is not a political system to be recommended,
but we can observe that there’s a Chinese version of TikTok and there’s an
American version of TikTok. The American version of TikTok is completely
uncontrolled. It runs all the time. It feeds the worst possible content to
especially young people to drive them to engage. The Chinese version of
TikTok is blocked during certain hours. It limits the total amount of time
you’re allowed to be on it. Imagine China invaded Taiwan tomorrow and
immediately started amplifying all the American voices on TikTok that were
saying that “Taiwan had it coming. China’s the natural leader for this
area. It’s ridiculous that we’ve been resisting One China for so many
years” and suppressed all the American voices on that platform that were
saying, “This is outrageous. This is a free people,” blah, blah, blah. That
decision to suppress and amplify is what we call editorial judgment. It is
the core of First Amendment protection. When you say, “Could we do anything
about it?” the standard First Amendment answer is: “No, there’s nothing you
could do about that. That’s absolutely the most protected thing you could
have.”
I am pretty cynical about the bipartisan nature, or the supposed
bipartisan nature, of wanting to regulate Facebook. What I see is a bunch
of politicians on both sides who know the First Amendment exists. You can’t
just go ask the platforms for content moderation that would favor their
party. Whenever they see a weapon like the Haugen papers, the Facebook
Files, they say, “Oh, we can just threaten you with legislation that may or
may not pass, but we’ll threaten you with it. That’ll be a lawsuit, and
that’ll be a long process for you to go fight it, and the public opinion
will be against you, or you can just change your rules. You can just
moderate content to favor the Republicans or favor the Democrats.”
2024 will be that plus an order of magnitude greater danger produced by
foreign governments that have targeted the United States in this election.
There are all sorts of stories of the Russians in 2016 and 2020. The
Chinese in 2024 — it’s already revealed this is what they’re doing. The
first round will be the Taiwanese elections in January of ’24, where they
have already begun to figure out how they can flood that space to create
disinformation to tilt the election in the way that they want to tilt it.
That’s just a dry run. In fact, the technology they’re using will work
better in America than it does in Taiwan because it turns out the AI is
better tuned to English than it is to the Taiwanese version of Chinese. We
will be completely vulnerable to something that has as its purpose screwing
up our election.
The mechanism is AI? Or the expression is AI in your mind, specifically
TikTok? It’s the algorithms behind things like TikTok, but it’s also, more
importantly, the content generation capabilities that LLMs will give them.
The LLM capability to mislead people into believing that they are engaging
with certain people about certain things, that they’ve seen a certain
speech by Obama, a speech by Biden, or a speech by Trump — all of these
things that we don’t have any defense mechanism for right now will just
flood into the system. Think of it like pathogens. They will just spread
pathogens throughout the system, and we have no antibodies for them. As
you’re pointing out, because you’re obviously legally educated, we also
have a constitutional barrier to building those antibodies or at least the
government taking steps to build those antibodies. The most dominant
platforms for facilitating the spread of information have basically given
up. I’m not sure what Facebook will actually do in 2024; they’re back and
forth about it, but Elon Musk has fired the election team. That platform
alone is terrifying from its effect of what it’s going to do for
misunderstanding in this context.
But this war in Israel right now, I think, is a perfect example of
this. The level of misinformation on both sides is astonishing, and yet,
you don’t see people reacting in a healthy way. It’s not like you see them
shifting to sources that will help them understand. Instead, they’re just
doubling down on the sources that help them to misunderstand.
I think one of the most startling facts of the past three years: after
January 6th, a bunch of polling reported in January of 2021 found that 70
percent of Republicans believed Donald Trump that the election was stolen.
When that number came out, everybody was saying, “Well, that’s just
temporary. They’ll get it. Eventually, they’ll just relax.”
It went down a little bit, but it’s now come back up. If we were talking
about the Soviet Union and you said, “Well, in the Soviet Union, they
believe that America caused the war in whatever, and they still believe
that completely false fact,” we’d say, “Yeah, well, that’s because you’ve
got state-run media.” Well, we don’t have state-run media here, but you can
still perpetrate an obvious lie, and that stays. Not just stays: it gets
embedded into the identity of the people who consume that media and not
accidentally, both because the business model of social media is engagement
and it turns out the politics of hate is the most effective way to get
people to follow, and also because there’s strategic bad actors who are
very good at leveraging and using the platform.
I want to stay focused on the AI component for one second. There’s the
AI-powered recommendation algorithms that a normal consumer encounters when
they use a platform. There, I think you have a TikTok problem. The Chinese
government is entangled with TikTok in some way. That it’s meaningful or
not, it’s actually very hard to know, but they’re definitely entangled with
ByteDance, which owns TikTok, and people might encounter those
recommendation algorithms. Those are obviously opaque. Everyone’s pages are
similarly opaque. There’s not even a shared cultural context behind the
algorithms everyone is experiencing there.
That’s one bit of regulation, and you can see that the government might
be able to fumble its way towards a theory of banning or restricting TikTok
or forcing a sale to Oracle, all these ideas that they’ve tried. “This is a
foreign actor. They’ve built a distribution channel to millions upon
millions of young Americans. We should probably take a look at that.” You
can see how the government could wind its way to the Supreme Court and
potentially win on some theory of restricting that platform. The other part
of it — “Oh, there’s a bunch of LLMs in the world that can be used to make
misinformation, and we should impose some sort of regulatory structure such
that you can’t just lie to people at scale.” That runs headfirst into the
First Amendment. Even if you’re a foreign national in this country and you
decide to use Google Bard to tell you a lie, that’s fine. I can’t figure
out how to make that illegal. Can you figure out how to make that illegal?
Absolutely, but the question is, if you are sitting there watching
week-by-week engagement numbers, Taylor Swift invested a long time in
building the brand that would make it so that she could be an oracle of
something good and true, and it’s not —I’m saying most durable art makes
people feel good, not bad. I love what she’s doing, and she’s a hero, not
just because — I’m not asking you to criticize Taylor Swift. I’m just
challenging your premise that the single most effective way to build
engagement is anger.
Indeed, the best example of this is in 2017. In the fall of 2017,
ProPublica published an article about how Facebook had an ad category
called “Jew haters.” You could buy “Jew haters” as a category and advertise
to Jew haters. When ProPublica published this, Facebook was like, “Whoa,
whoa, whoa, whoa. We didn’t do that. There was no human that wrote that
category.” That was true. It was the AI that generated that category. The
point is that we’ve got to break the tyranny of analogical reasoning here.
It’s like the editor at The New York Times, but it is not the editor at The
New York Times. If you do that, then you can begin to see that we need to
have a capacity to respond to this new kind of threat, which is different
from, I think, the traditional issues that we were talking about in the
context of copyright. That was the TikTok issue. Remind me of the second
one because I thought that was really interesting.
That a foreign national in this country uses ChatGPT to tell a lie,
and that should be somehow restricted. The challenge there is, you’re
right, the foreign national has certain rights.
We’ll just make the foreign national Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin
shows up, probably in Florida, and he opens up ChatGPT and says, “Tell some
lies about the election.” That is almost certainly protected speech.
Certainly protected speech, although, remember that the DC circuit, Brett
Kavanaugh writing the opinion, affirmed without dissent by the United
States Supreme Court, upheld the idea that you could limit the ability of
legal immigrants to spend money independently of a political campaign
because we’re trying to protect the American democracy to be a democracy
that Americans choose. There’s a tension in the jurisprudence. On the one
hand, you speak like Citizens United does. It says that the question is
just the speech, and does the government have the right to regulate
“speech”? It doesn’t matter who’s speaking. [Supreme Court Justice Antonin]
Scalia, when he wrote his concurrence in Citizens United, said,
“Everybody’s making a big deal about the fact that we’re giving rights to
corporations. That has nothing to do with it. The question is whether the
government has a right to regulate the speech. Who cares who’s uttering it?
It could be a robot uttering the speech, a replicant uttering the speech.
It could be you uttering the speech.”
Walk me through that specifically because I’m still stuck on the idea
that if we’re going to write some regulation, especially in the context of
speech, it ought to be strict scrutiny from the beginning, very narrowly
tailored. That means you have to define the problem. When you say “hand in
glove,” there’s going to be a bunch of weird generative AI-created content
about our election that gets fed through an AI recommendation algorithm?
I’ll walk you through this, but let’s be clear about what I’m trying to
say: What I’m trying to say is that enterprise of figuring out how to
regulate media to solve that problem, I think, is hopeless. We’re not going
to regulate media to solve that problem. That problem’s going to be there
in some form, some metastasized, dangerous form, regardless of what
regulation there is, even if we have creative ways of thinking about how to
get around the First Amendment. These two things work together because the
recommendation engine is just very good at figuring out what people are
open to. You have a firehose of AI-generated content —Yeah, content — —
and the recommendation algorithm is going to —— figuring out where to aim
it. It’s like shotguns that have guidance missiles on top of them. The
pellets have guidance missile systems. My point is that’s going to happen,
and we should recognize we can’t do democracy in that space. It’s not going
to work. Then, we’ve got to think about: where can we rebuild democracy or
what could it look like that was protected from that sort of thing?
One of the things that is happening around the world, completely
invisible in American media, but one of the most interesting democratic
innovations that’s happening around the world is the explosion of things called
citizen assemblies. France did a huge one around climate change. Ireland
has done a whole bunch of them, including two that proposed ending
regulations on abortion and endorsing same-sex marriage. The citizen
assembly came up with those solutions, overwhelmingly supported them, and
then it went out to referendum. The public overwhelmingly supported them.
We know that the politicians in Ireland could never have supported those
two things, but these citizen assemblies could do it. There are hundreds in
Japan; they’re all through Europe right now. There’ve been some tiny
experiments in the United States, but not much. The point about these
citizen assemblies is that these are places where citizens confront each
other. They’re representative. They’re large and representative. They
confront each other. They hear the other side. They see that the other
side’s not a bunch of reptiles — they’re ordinary humans with the same
issues, like, “How do I make sure my kid has a job after high school?” When
they experience that, they deliberate, and they come up with some
resolution of some issue — whatever it is that’s being presented to them —
it has been protected. It’s almost like it’s in a shelter from the
corrupting influences of AI, whether foreign-dominated influences or even
just commercial engagement influences. What I think is that the more people
see this, the more they’ll be like, “Well, let’s see more of this. Let’s
figure out how we can make this more of our democratic process.”
Our democratic relation to other people is to hate the other side. The
politics of hate is not just that we’re polarized — it’s that we have to turn
into villains people who are not the same political view as we are. What I
believe is that we’re going to have to find a way to begin to build
something different while, at the same time, we’re going to fight the war
to make sure the media doesn’t poison us too much. Again, the radiation
metaphor, I think, is really powerful here. The skies open up, and we’re
not protected from the UVs in the way we were before. We’re going to have
to go underground, we’re going to have to have shades on, and we’re going
to have to protect as much as we can. [It’s] not clear we’re going to
succeed. It’s hard to acknowledge exactly how terrifying these threats are.
The politics threat is one thing. Your friends report a conversation with
one of the big AI companies, one of the senior developers at one of the big
AI companies, who said, “My kids are not going to see high school.” What
that statement was is that he thinks we’re not going to be able to control
what happens with AI. It is an existential threat that we will not meet.
When you realize exactly how dangerous these things are and exactly how
weak our capacity to do something collectively about it is, there’s a lot
of reasons to be terrified about it, and that leads a bunch of people to
say, “Well, whatever. I’ll just spend my time watching Netflix.”
I have two strong views, and one is very surprising. The not surprising
view I have is that, whether you call it fair use or not, using creative
work to learn something, whether you’re a machine or not, should not be a
copyright event. Now, maybe we should regulate in another way. Maybe we
should have a compulsory license-like structure or some structure for
compensation. I’m all for that, but the idea that we try to regulate AI
through copyright law is crazy talk.
Is that a policy decision or a legal conclusion? It’s a legal conclusion.
I think that [if you] run the fair use analysis, that’s what you get. Even
if — the Sarah Silverman case, I’ll take it for an example. They clearly
took her entire book, and they can clearly spit out excerpts of her entire
book. Somehow, in that, you run that analysis... I think that’s a coin
flip. Fair use in the courts right now feels like maybe more of a coin flip
than ever before. There’s a recent case that might make it more of a coin
flip than I would’ve thought. [Supreme Court Justice Elena] Kagan wrote a
very strong dissent in the case. Maybe that signals that copyright law is
shifting in a new way. The question of legal access to the underlying
material is always there. I’m saying if you have access to the underlying
material and you have the machine —That’s where your license scheme would
come in. Yeah, and I’m not even sure it’s a licensing point. My point is,
if it’s out there in the world, somebody has legal access to it and they
use it to learn, that’s not a copyright event. Reading a book is not a
copyright event. Even though when you do it online, it technically copies,
the whole point is it shouldn’t be a copyright event because the
equivalence — reading — is the sort of thing that was free. It was
protected as free. Copyright was a narrow range of controls that we had to
impose to create incentives for authors. I don’t think any of those
controls are relevant to the context of the training. I’m a very strong
“Training is free.” The view I have, which is surprising to people, or
people who know anything, the 10 people in the world who know anything
about my views about copyright —I have to make sure I’m one of those
people.— is that I absolutely think that, when you use AI to create work,
there ought to be a copyright that comes out of that. The copyright office
has just said no. They’ve said no. What they’ve said is, “Maybe if you have
a complicated enough prompt, then you can get a copyright,” which we used
to say fair use was the right to hire a lawyer. Now, copyright is the right
to hire a lawyer because you’re like, “Here’s my prompt. Is that a
copyright or not?” when what we need is an efficient system to basically
just allocate the rights.
I push Generative Fill in Photoshop; it immediately goes to the
copyright office, says in some database, “Here’s my picture I made in
Photoshop.” And, “Here’s how it was made, when it was made and what fed
into it.” Whatever the provenance has to be to make it useful, I’m not sure
of that exactly, but if you began to do that, you would begin to build an
infrastructure of registries that would make it easier for us to begin to
navigate in this context. The other reason to push for this is that artists
in the next 10 years are going to increasingly move to AI generation for
their art. If you don’t get copyright from that, then basically, these
people have almost no way to make any living. You’ll remember this, I hope,
from copyright law: the birth of America, foreign authors got no American
copyright, and all the Americans thought, “This is great. We’re protecting
the Americans against the foreigners.” Of course, what that meant is that
all the English books were much cheaper than the American books. The
American authors were at a disadvantage because the English authors weren’t
getting copyright. The American authors began to push, “Give everybody
copyright so that there’s no un-level playing field.”
Well, that’s the same with this generative AI. If, when I sit down and
I make a creative work, I get a copyright, and you push a button on
Midjourney and there’s no copyright there, the people consuming that work,
like businesses trying to build advertising, are going to stop dealing with
the artists, they’re going to just deal with Midjourney, and they’re going
to get all this stuff for free that they can use in a commercial way that
the artists before would’ve been compensated for. Don’t the basic laws of
supply and demand get in the way well before the copyright licensing cost?
If I’m using Midjourney, I can make 10,000 images in the time it takes an
artist to make their first cup of coffee. This is what I hear from artists
and musicians: our markets are about to get flooded with C+ work because
most of it’s C+ work, and most people don’t care enough, but if you have
enough supply of C+ work, the price of that will fall to zero, and no one
will ever pay us for A+ work. Whether or not paying me for A+ work comes
with an appropriate copyright license or not seems pretty secondary to that
basic economic problem.
Well, think about photographs. The same dynamic happened with
photography. In the old days, when the only people who had cameras were
professionals, the quality of photographs was very good. Then, all this
consumer cameras and then digital cameras came along, so the number of
pictures in the world went up dramatically, and the average quality of them
went down. Now, you would say, “Did that mean that there wasn’t a demand
for professional photographers?” Well, a lot of them went away, but there
are still pretty good professional photographers who are hired for
substantial amounts for their particular professional work. My point, I
think, is slightly different. All I’m saying is we need to have a world
where everybody’s on the level playing field — every creative work is
protected in some sense. I just want to radically lower the cost of
negotiating that protection. If we radically lowered the cost of
negotiating that protection, then the best work would rise to the surface
more easily, and people would be rewarded for having figured out how to
produce that best work.
I would say that, knowing what I know of you, that is a surprising
viewpoint! Do you feel like you’ll end up in a place where copyright steps
in, as it so often does, as another solution to other problems? Provenance:
“I want to know this was made by a person. Now, there’s a federal database
that would tell me if it’s a person or an AI, and copyright will be the
vehicle by which this information is disseminated.” It could be copyright.
This actually relates to another part of a really great question you asked
before that I think it’s important to be clear about. When you were asking
about AI in the context of elections and how are you ever going to control
that stuff because there are all sorts of ... right now, proprietary AI
like OpenAI has said, “You can’t use this content for political speech,”
but we have all sorts of open-source models out there that can use the
content for political speech.
One question is, “Can you do anything about that?” The answer is
absolutely: you could control American campaigns. People are not creative
enough about how to control it, but if, for example, you made every
treasurer of every campaign swear on the penalty of perjury that no money
was spent for any AI-generated content in that campaign, you could shut it
down right away, but that still would leave you vulnerable to the foreign
influence. Now, that’s not to say that there shouldn’t be something we do
about it — we should do that — but the point is it will never be complete.
I think the blockchain people are desperate for a use case that looks like
this, anything other than what they’ve got now.
I want to end more in the weeds on something: I started out by saying
it feels like a reset moment on the internet. The platforms are shifting;
user behavior is shifting. A thing that has jumped out to me, maybe more
than anything, is that younger people on the internet are so deeply aware
of copyright law in a way that my generation wasn’t, beyond getting sued
for using Napster. That was basically our interaction with copyright law.
Right now, on YouTube, there is a controversy over so-called react videos,
where one creator makes a video, a bigger creator reacts to that video,
adds nothing other than some faces, potentially, and then they get all the
views. This is fine or not fine, but actually, within the creator sphere on
YouTube, the notion that this is a copyright violation, something should be
done, this is wrong, and they’re going to reach to copyright law is very
strong. There’s actually a copyright maximalism amongst younger creators
that is shocking to me. Do you see that there’s a new folk private
copyright law where, because speech regulations are definitely against the
American idea, we’re going to substitute in our folk wisdom about what
copyright law can or should be. We’re going to say fair use like a magical
incantation to claim moral superiority and have a fight. That seems all
very wrong to me. Something bad is about to happen here because we’re once
again training people to talk about regulating speech without actually
talking about regulating speech.
Of course, everybody plays that game, where they’re issuing takedowns to
everybody, but that created this really perverse incentive for people to
basically create complete ripoffs of other people’s work and then just use
the same mechanism to go after them. These were all complete fraudsters.
There are people who take public domain work, they put it up, and then they
use this registration system to say, “These other people producing the
public domain work are violating my copyright,” and the machine’s not smart
enough to be able to do anything about it. This, I think, has created an
economy of what feels to me like real piracy because these are not creators
who are trying to do something creative, remixing in some interesting way;
they’re just trying to exploit the system to steal from others. That
reaction creates a counter-reaction, which is, I think, the culture you’ve
identified.
It’s particularly bad in music. I know a lot of music podcasters, for
example, who just won’t put their work on YouTube because it’s too hard.
Music is, quite frankly, one of the worst areas for fair use. This is what
radicalized me, by the way. If you try to give the equivalent of text and
music — and film is the same — the freedoms that we take for granted in the
context of text just don’t exist in the context of music and don’t exist in
the same way in the context of film. They could. What’s necessary is the
courts or maybe Congress to tilt it in a direction to try to achieve a kind
of common recognition of fair use across these platforms. Instead, there’s
been conventions set by industries that were long before the internet that
creates these expectations.
This is happening right now. YouTube is entering into deals, particularly
with Universal Music, where they’re going to invent some private copyright
law on the platform to deal with AI. There was an AI artist on YouTube that
sounded like Drake. It’s a big scandal. Universal got very mad about it.
YouTube has basically said, “We’re going to invent some stuff for you so
that if there’s AI that sounds like Drake, we’ll let you take it down.”
That’s not in any federal law that I can find or any decision that I can
find yet. It hasn’t been litigated. It’s not really in any state law
outside of likeness. You basically have a private copyright law to one
platform for the benefits of the music label. You could argue that that is
an appropriate market solution to this problem, but it feels like we should
probably actually have a law. Where do you think that lands?
It could be a market solution, assuming we’re not having an antitrust issue
involved. I’m not sure I would assume that right now.
With YouTube specifically?
Yeah, with YouTube and some of these labels. I have a lot of sympathy for
the artists who are anxious about the fact that their style is taken and
used in a particular way. AI is obviously making this easy, trivial. That’s
why I said at the beginning I think there might be sui generis ways to
compensate for that sort of consequence.
I think what we need is a vigorous debate on both sides of it, and what
we saw in the early internet was that most of the loudest, most important
forces were coming from the maximalist control perspective. That was a
mistake. It was a mistake for artists. I remember 20 years ago, artists
were convinced that this campaign of copyright extremism would produce an
internet that would be profitable for artists. Well, ask artists how much
they get from Spotify today. It’s actually worked against the interest of
artists. I think that if we’d had a healthier debate back then, more open,
less moralistic, like there were criminals on one side, pirates on one side
and believers in property on the other, we could’ve come up with a better
solution. I hope that we have... well, I don’t actually hope — I don’t
think there’s any hope for this at all, but what we ought to be having is a
healthier debate about that today.
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